A print shop typically includes a number of high-volume printers capable of printing large print jobs (e.g., hundreds or thousands of documents). The print shop may be managed by a print server that receives raw print jobs from a host and converts the raw print jobs into a series of rasterized images that a print engine may use for physically marking media. During rasterization, the print server may refer to job ticket information for how a particular page, or range of pages, in the print job are to be rasterized. Examples of job ticket information include a particular media size (e.g., A4 or letter size), plex (e.g., single-sided or double-sided), or an N-up format for placing one or multiple logical pages onto a sheet for printing.
Before rasterizing or scheduling the print job with a printer, the print server may perform a preflight step which gathers attribute information from the job ticket, determines characteristics of each page/sheet to be printed, and stores sheet information for each sheet that is to be printed. The preflight data may then be stored in memory so that it may be referenced during processing of the print job to convert the raw print job into properly formatted rasterized page images. It is therefore desirable for the preflight data to be efficiently collected and stored.